Paula Vennells was back in Phase 5/6 of the Post Office Inquiry and now we're at Phase 7 - thread 5

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread about the Post Office Inquiry:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5105378-paula-vennells-is-history-but-now-at-the-post-office-inquiry-is-fujitsu-distinguished-engineer-gareth-jenkins-thread-4

The Inquiry is at Phase 7 which is about how things stand now and looking to the future. Here's the timetable:

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/phase-7-timetable

When the hearings are going on, live-streaming can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/featured

All of the previous hearings can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/videos

If I've got this right, in the wake of the Common Issues Judgment in 2019, the top of Post Office, reeling in shock, decided the legal advice that had taken them to that point was deficient and they moved to get the really big guns in and appointed Herbert Smith Freehills. MacLeod saw this as effectively making her redundant so she left and Foat was asked to step up from a Legal Director role to General Counsel.

So he did get to the top spot during which the catastrophe was still unfolding.

Mr Beer is the Superman of Inquiries. 😁
He is very good at them.

I read an interview he gave, in which he said its an area he has always wanted to work in.
He had an excellent mentor, whom I forgotten the name, but his mentor really supported him to develop as an Inquiry Lawyer KC.

Mr Beer explained he is now trying to do the the same for his mentees, Mr Blake and Ms Hodge, which is why they are now asking most of the questions.

Hmm, I'm not sure I believe him.

It is just too convenient, seeing as Jane Macleod is in Australia and the Inquiry can't force her to attend.

It's just too easy for him to put all the blame on Jane.

Here is the interview with Mr Beer.
Even we (rhis mumsnet thread) gets a mention 😂

https://www.thelawyer.com/the-public-is-the-client-jason-beer-kc-on-being-on-the-side-of-the-angels/

What is clear was that he was appointed General Counsel at a time when all of the bad decisions had led to the complete and utter mess and dysfunction and he's been dealing with the fall-out ever since. (There's the question as to how effectively he's been at that and how honest he's been.)

That was a somewhat gentle cross-examination by Blake. Maybe the Inquiry sees him as a fall-guy to some extent.

I do smirk whenever I hear reference to someone being a "criminal lawyer" in Post Office.

Yes ….so very apt .

There's been a game of musical chairs in the timetable.

Simon Recaldin, Remediation Unit Director at Post Office, didn't appear this week and will instead by appearing on Monday 4 November. I think that was the date scheduled for Charles Donald, Chief Executive Officer of UK Government Investments, but now he'll be appearing on Friday 8 November. In this shuffle Kemi Badenoch was moved from Wednesday 6 November to Monday 11 November.

There might be some other changes.

nauticant · Today 12:33

I do smirk whenever I hear reference to someone being a "criminal lawyer" in Post Office.

A criminal; a lawyer...

... and a subpostmaster, walk into a bar.

....and somehow the sub postmaster ends up paying for the criminal and the lawyer's drinks and can't afford one for him/herself.

Very good @grumpygrape

This has been foreshadowed by some of the discussion here about Post Office not being a problem that can be solved by a series of new senior executive teams, each failing in its own way:

Ministers are exploring plans to hand ownership of the Post Office to thousands of sub-postmasters across Britain in an historic shake-up at the 364 year-old institution.

Sky News has learnt that the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has asked BCG, the management consultancy, to examine options for mutualising the Post Office.

https://news.sky.com/story/whitehall-to-deliver-plan-to-mutualise-crisis-hit-post-office-13236313

The big question is whether the government will continue to fund it to, at the very least, enable Post Office to pay for a replacement for Horizon that is reliable and fit for purpose. Without it, a future government is going to be presented with Post Office in the midst a catastrophic failure that will need to be rescued.

This is from the latest Nick Wallis email:

"The Inquiry is taking a two-week break before reconvening on 4 November. There will be eight more days of evidence over two weeks and then a break until closing statements, which I believe are going to be on 18/19 December, but I may have got that wrong.
All the best guesses about when Sir Wyn Williams will deliver his report after that seem to be between three and six months. I would be astounded if he gets it out before the end of March, but he might want to deliver it before the summer break. That is simply a guess."

I'm surprised at the idea of a (presumably huge) report arriving in the first half of next year but I'd be thrilled to have it as my Summer reading.

The Inquiry resumes today. The schedule for this week:

Monday 4 November
Simon Recaldin – Remediation Unit Director at Post Office Ltd

Tuesday 5 November
Sarah Munby – former Permanent Secretary at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Wednesday 6 November (9:30am start)
The Rt. Hon. Kevin Hollinrake MP – former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Trade; former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Carl Creswell – Director of Post Office Policy and Business Engagement in the Department for Business and Trade

Thursday 7 November
Lorna Gratton – Shareholder Non-Executive Director of Post Office Ltd; UK Government Investments Official
Sir Alex Chisholm KCB – former Chief Operating Officer and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office

Friday 8 November
The Rt. Hon. Gareth Thomas MP – Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Trade
Charles Donald – Chief Executive Officer of UK Government Investments

I'm most interested in Tuesday and Thursday. I think the interactions between the Civil Servants and UKGI is one of the "untold stories" in the scandal.

Sorry, I've missed a bit recently. Will catch up.

I don't have the energy to give any depth to a summary of Recaldin's evidence but: (1) what a mess, and (2) ultimately, the non-stated aim of Post Office is to get supostmasters to settle for £75000 even if that's much lower than they should be entitled to because they just cannot bearing fighting any longer because that could continue for years with a very uncertain outcome.

There were lots of interesting details but I'll just mention one here. Recaldin said that he'd had a 30+ year career with a glowing record but in the relatively short time he'd been at Post Office he'd been investigated 5 times. No details about what they were about but that organisation is a total mess of dysfunction.

Saw the mn comment in his interview link. Can I join the Mn we all love Mr Beer society.
Hopefully someone will post a compilation video of his PO best bits, so that we can all swoon at his intellect /clever subtle questioning.

I've watched the video again of PV and her crocodile tears, which are vomit inducing.

Sarah Munby: posh, clever, precise, highly technocratic. Had a career in management consultancy before being placed at a very senior role in the Civil Service where she had responsibility for a number of entities (arm's length bodies) including Post Office.

Farkin' 'ell.

Says a lot about the modus operandi of the untouchables – and why they were untouchable.

Sorry, that's me rushing to presume the investigations were all to do with nefarious conduct by the investigators, rather than nefarious conduct by the investigatee.

Which might be false. But...

Sarah Munby's evidence didn't seem that interesting to start with, rather dry, but for me it got more interesting the more it went on.

The enlightening stuff for me related to the abbreviations VFM (Value for Money) and MPM (Managing Public Money) and how these concepts influence decision-making in the Civil Service and the government.

As I interpreted her evidence, the Civil Service wanted to avoid creating a compensation scheme that gave a correct amount of compensation. This was because it would be very complicated because the subpostmasters' (SPMs) cases were very different and often very complicated, which would mean spending resources and money, and the preference was for cheap and cheerful having a blanket approach. But this meant that some SPMs would win, and some would lose. For no one to lose, this would mean that at the higher end there would be big wins. In other words, to constrain costs to some degree, it was necessary that some SPMs would be short-changed. That was in the past, maybe in 2021.

Now things are very different. Munby was asked why but she was clearly evasive. Everyone knows why, it was political pressure as a result of widespread public disgust and outrage. She went round the houses several times to deflect away from the real reason why the "political head of steam" built up. A programme on the telly.

She's still a Permanent Secretary, she's loyal, and she did what was required of her, she used her cleverness to mis-direct over why the government only did the right thing at the very end. (And that's still open to question.) But although she was willing to use mis-direction to provide cover, she sensibly wasn't willing to put a layer of untruth over the truth. And so despite what she was saying, the subtext of what she was really saying was evident.

One thing I found funny is that she was in good control of herself but sometimes when she trying it on, Australian up-speak tended to creep in.

More unintentional comedy was provide by "Full, fair, and prompt" with respect to compensation payments. She went into mandarin to non-explain what this meant which then turned rather Jesuitical.

Although I wasn't wholly convinced by Staunton's evidence, Munby's evidence suggested to me that he would have got the message: "of course you can give full and fair compensation, but we'll only fund if it's done on the cheap".

Overall, Munby's evidence wasn't about which naughty person did X, but was more what were the forces operating that contributed to the mess the government made of managing the scandal.

What I found so difficult to hear were her repeated claims that financial prudence was the be all and end in public expenditure matters.
This after the billions lost to the Covid ‘friends and family frauds’ was hypocritical and cruel.